I have ordered the Department of Defense to begin bringing our people home from Europe.
Thirty-eight thousand Americans and their families have been stationed on a continent that froze our accounts four days ago. They are not hostages and they are not going to become hostages. They are coming home.
This is not a punishment. This is the end of an arrangement that stopped making sense a long time ago. Europe has been asking us to leave for twenty years without ever saying the words. Consider the words said.
closed channel
By nightfall on 26 January roughly 2,300 of a planned first wave of 6,000 had left. Fourteen of twenty-six scheduled sorties flew. The rest were held by German clearances and by a payment chain his own opponent's sanctions had broken.